The Marxism of Paul Mattick

Those works of Paul Mattick which have been published in France have given rise to only a few responses and to almost no, favorable commentary.1 One can hardly be astonished at this, for the work of this old German radical, quite unmindful of intellectual fashions, has been nothing but an unremitting denunciation of the myths and ideologies which have flowered in the course of the long consolidation of capitalism since the Second World War. Even in the years when capitalism went, in Germany, Italy, and Japan, "from miracle to miracle," Mattick did not believe that the Keynesian or neo-Keynesian policies were nullifying Marx's prognostics as to the contradictions and limits of the accumulation of capital. But Mattick did not only persist in opposing Marx to Keynes; above all — and this is much more unusual — he also opposed Marx to almost all those who claimed to speak in his name. According to Mattick, the self-proclaimed continuators of Marx have been only his epigones, all guilty, since the end of the 19th century, of having falsified the meaning of Marxism by refusing to see it as a theory of the collapse of capitalism or by deducing that collapse from premises other than Marx's own.

Beyond their divergences and the conflicting conclusions to which they led, the revisionists (Cunow, Schmidt, Tugan-Baranowsky), the Austro-Marxists (Bauer, Hilferding), the Bolsheviks, and the Luxemburgists had this in common: they believed it possible to construct the theory of crisis and to examine closely the dynamic of capitalism on the basis of the reproduction schemes of Volume II of Capital.2 Starting from these, some derived crises from a breakdown of proportionality between the production of the two departments, others from under-consumption. Whether they concluded that the system adapts itself or that on the contrary it faces a future of ever more violent convulsions, all of these arguments presupposed that the contradictions of capitalism are to be found in the sphere of circulation. But, while it is certainly true that crises make themselves known in the guise of an over-production of commodities and of labor-power, to describe their manifestations at the level of the market is not the same as to bring to light their real determinations.

In reality crises originate not in circulation but in production itself: they break out when there is a breakdown of the necessary proportionality between the production of surplus-value and the needs of accumulation. It is the insufficiency of surplus-value that periodically interrupts the continuity of enlarged reproduction, and crises are overcome only when capital finds the means to raise the rate of profit to the level necessary for a recommencement of accumulation. If one wishes to demonstrate that capitalism does not have an infinite future before it — which was without doubt Marx's ambition — one can do this only by showing that this mode of production is evolving towards a limiting situation in which the counter-tendencies opposed to the lowering of the profit rate can no longer continue to operate. To ignore or to reject the idea that Marxism is fundamentally a theory of the impossibility of an unlimited development of capitalism, as did almost all the theoreticians of the II International and the Bolsheviks, amounts to severing from Marx's thought its most essential aspect.

But this mutilation is obviously neither accidental nor senseless: on the contrary, it expresses the appearance, within Social Democracy and among the Bolsheviks, of a political project which no longer coincided with that of Marx. By supposing that, the contradictions of capitalism were gradually being attenuated, that exchange between the two departments of the economy remains always possible, or even that cartellization introduces into the system elements of conscious regulation which temper its original anarchy, the revisionists and the Austro-Marxists laid a theoretical foundation for a practice whose real function, experience was to show, was only to second the capitalist system's process of self-rationalization. And this is true for Lenin also, who borrowed the essentials of his analysis of imperialism from that of the social-democratic theorists — Hilferding and even Bauer — which led him to believe that the capitalism of trusts and monopolies and, even more, "war capitalism," was already a capitalism in the process of socializing itself. From this point of view, it is enough to seize the state from the capitalists and to complete the statification of the economy to establish the essential bases of the transition towards socialism. It is true that for the Bolsheviks, the passage to socialism presupposes the destruction of the bourgeois state, while the Social Democrats aspired to gradually take it over in order to use it for socialist ends. But their differences were with respect only to the means of reaching the same goal: the establishment of a state-controlled economy which would no longer experience the breakdowns of proportionality and the disequilibrium that capitalism on its own is unable to eliminate. Socialism as the Social Democrats and the Bolsheviks conceived it is only capitalism without its anarchy.3

Alone in this period Rosa Luxemburg placed herself on the terrain of authentic Marxism, by maintaining that capitalism follows an historical trajectory in the course of which it destroys, by its very expansion, the conditions necessary to its existence. But if in this way she understood much better than her contemporaries that "the law of the accumulation of capital is only the same as the law of capitalism's collapse," she got lost in making the ultimate impossibility of capitalism depend on the system's inability to realize all of the surplus value. Mattick, who takes for his own use Henryk Grossman's interpretation of the theory of accumulation, affirms, on the contrary, that the limits of the expansion of capital can result only from the fall of the rate of profit. According to Marx, the capitalist system is doomed to fall apart not because it doesn't succeed in realizing an excess of surplus-value but because it finds itself faced with a lack of surplus-value.

By challenging all the "disproportionality" and "under-consumptionist interpretations of Marxism in order to refocus the Marxian analysis of contemporary capitalism on the problem of the fall of the rate of profit. Mattick was able to show — and this by the sixties!4 — that a destabilization of the system was conceivable and probable. His merit is not small if we remember that in that era almost no one dared to maintain that capitalism, "revolutionized" by Keynesian policies, was still undermined by contradictions capable of bringing again into question the continuity and regularity of growth. While official economic science claimed to be in a position to supply governments with infallible recipes allowing it to put off indefinitely the dynamisms of the economy, and prophesied that the crisis cycle was finished for ever, the neo-Marxists and the "meta-Marxists," fascinated by the wonders realized by a system they had believed to be in its death-throes, shared this conviction. Baran, Sweezy, and so many others with them, who were, as Mattick says, hardly more than Marxistic Keynesians, affirmed that since the law of the fall of the profit rate had given way to a law of rising surplus, modern capitalism was now confronted only by an excess of products. It dealt with this by a systematic organization of waste under multiple forms, and it would be able in this way indefinitely to overcome its latent tendencies toward stagnation.5 As for Marcuse, he said that he was persuaded that the power of technological development would henceforth give capitalism the means to organize ever more solidly the integration of the proletariat, on the basis of a continual increase of consumption within the affluent society. Between the capitalism analyzed by Marx and contemporary society there was a break in continuity: the world had entered into a new period whose history no longer operated in terms of the mechanisms that Marx had had, at one time, the illusion of exposing. All these theoretical innovations caused a great stir in the intellectual world. And nevertheless, by supposing that there did not exist, or that there no longer existed, objective limits to the growth of capitalist production, the innovators were doing no more than exhuming from the dust of time a picture of capitalism which at bottom had already been developed by Tugan and Hilferding.

In reality, if after 1945 capitalism succeeded in reviving and regularizing growth, this was not so much thanks to the measures suggested to governments by economic science as because the depression of the thirties and the war, by halting accumulation for a long time and by destroying an unprecedented amount of plant and equipment, had allowed the return of the conditions which make it possible for an expanding capital to valorize itself. Everywhere, in fact, the renewal of fixed capital was achieved on the basis of measures rationalizing production and of developing new technological means which would permit, for many years. increasing productivity more rapidly than wages. This augmentation of the rate of exploitation made it possible to slow down the decline of the profit rate and even to raise that rate appreciably in the countries — Western Europe, Japan — where capital constructed a highly productive technology while wages remained at a relatively low level.

However, the crisis of capitalism was only imperfectly overcome, as was shown by the marked inequalities of development that continued to characterize the world economy. If growth was exceptionally strong in Europe and Japan, the Third World, harshly pillaged by imperialism, continued, for lack of capital, to stagnate in underdevelopment, and even in America the rate of accumulation remained below the historical mean for this country. The most powerful capitalism on earth just barely succeeded in stabilizing its rate of profit, and U.S. capital was soon forced to seek abroad, by way of its multinational corporations, the surplus-value which businesses situated on American territory did not produce in sufficient quantity. World capitalism as a whole continued to find itself confronted with a relative shortage of surplus-value and the measures that governments took within the framework of the mixed economy to revive growth, each time that the curve turned down, changed nothing in this situation.

When in effect the state places orders with the private sector to hinder deepening recessions or to shorten their duration, the expenditures undertaken by the government indeed make possible the employment of workers who would otherwise have been unemployed, and the production of goods which would otherwise have not been produced. But production to the state's account is paid for with surplus-value already crystallized (or expected to be) in the form of money capital, with the result that this production does not increase the mass of surplus-value convertible into capital. The volume of government-stimulated production and that of the resulting public expenditure can in reality not increase more rapidly than the social product. For things to be otherwise, the amount of surplus-value available for capital accumulation would have to contract, which would certainly lead to conflict between the ruling strata of society and their state itself.

This is just to say that the mixed economy was able to give capitalism the appearance of a system whose contradictions were overcome by state action only to the extent that capital had succeeded in stopping the decline of profitability by its own means. But this consolidation of capitalism could only be temporary because the "consumer society" bore within its own functioning the seeds of a new phase of the decline in the rate of profit.

Mattick shows how, since the sixties, the signs — then rarely perceived — of this downturn began to manifest themselves. The extraordinary expansion of unproductive labor, the swelling of the expenses that states found themselves compelled to undertake to check the tendencies to underemployment of labor and capital, the increasing pressure of wage-costs, more and more difficult to contain to the extent that the regularizaton of growth diminished the industrial reserve army, slowly choked the rate of profit. Once again, a breakdown of proportionality between the production of surplus-value and the needs of accumulation was underway.

It is true that inflation for a time permitted the containment of the amplification of a crisis which was developing from the mid-sixties on. The systematic increase of prices which, by lowering the value of real wages and the revenues of social groups living on surplus-value, permits the increase by that amount of the part of that same surplus-value convertible into capital, became a new means of palliating the increasing difficulties of enlarged reproduction. But when the inflation in its turn led to 'stagflation," it became clear that the additional surplus-value taken by capital by raising prices could no longer be transformed sufficiently rapidly into additional investments to block the reappearance of significant unemployment. A cycle of capital has been coming to an end: the inflation itself no longer suffices to raise profits to the point where a rapid revival of accumulation would permit the breaking of new limits to the increase of productivity.

Marcuse was seriously mistaken when he affirmed that capitalism was henceforth in a position, by means of the employments of an ever more productive technology, to accumulate and at the same time to raise the level of consumption. This was to forget that the accelerated incorporation of science into industry presupposes that the system has always at its disposal a sufficient quantity of surplus-value convertible into capital to make practical use of the technological innovations it holds in reserve or can develop. Above all it was to fail to see that it is not possible, within capitalist relations of production, to counteract the decline in the rate of profit by an indefinite substitution of technological means for living labor. Already, in the most advanced countries, the number of productive workers is stagnating or even falling. If we suppose that in the period to come capital would succeed in appropriating sufficient surplus-value to carry productivity, step by step, to ever higher levels, the contraction of the strata producing surplus-value would accentuate and the system would lead to a situation in which variable capital no longer represented more than a declining and finally negligible fraction of the total capital. But then the very possibility of capitalist production, as production based on the extraction of surplus-value and its realization in the sale of commodities, would become problematic.6

In this line of thought one will recognize the arguments of Marx himself, when he explored the ultimate consequences of mechanization for the constitutive elements of the capitalist relations of production. It is true that Marx in his time appeared to pose a purely abstract problem, so long as capitalist reality was still far removed from the limiting case he strove to analyze. Today, the appearance and development of automation have strikingly reduced this distance, and the problems posed to capitalism by a continuous decrease of productive labor are tending to become more and more concrete and current problems. The powerful technological development that capitalism has succeeded in achieving in the course of the last decades does not allow the system to transcend the contradictions of accumulation: in Mattick's eyes it constitutes only a flight forward which, if it is to be pursued, will have no other effect than to bring the capitalist system ever closer to its historical limits.7

Doubtless Paul Mattick will be reproached for having conceived of the evolution and the future of capitalism in terms of a certain economic catastrophism, which is not unrelated to Luxemburgism, although it is based on completely different presuppositions. This is not totally wrong, since Mattick has always maintained, against everyone, that Marx's theory of accumulation was a theory of the breakdown of capitalism. It is much more incorrect to attribute to Mattick a conception of the historical process as reducible to a purely economic mechanism. It is obvious that the class struggle is not at the center of his analysis of the origins of the crisis and that in any case he does net pay much attention to various forms of struggle — resistance to speed-up. lowering labor productivity, absenteeism, turnover, etc. — which have added their effects to those of wage demands as factors of stagnation and then reduction of the rate of profit. But when he envisages the possible consequences of the crisis in which capitalism now seems to him to be involved, Mattick is careful not to predict that this is going to lead to a rapid resurgence of revolutionary struggle from the depths of the one- dimensional society, as if the proletariat's combativity and political lucidity would rise as an inverse function of the decline of profitability. Mattick belonged to a generation which did not have the naiveté to believe that revolution is in sight as soon as capitalism enters into crisis. Revolution, he says, is never a certainty, but neither is it a "mere Marxist dream," for if the proletariat can not make itself the gravedigger of capitalism and does not even conceive the idea during those phases when the system succeeds in consolidating itself by recovering the ability to accumulate, nothing can predict what will happen, if it turns out that the contradictions of the system are dislocating the economic foundations on which the integrated society is constructed. Mattick's catastrophism is not as optimistic as that of Marx or even Rosa Luxemburg. But neither is it completely without hope.

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Pierre Souyri

• 1This holds as well for the U.S. All references in the following notes are to works by Paul Mattick.
• 2See Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory (White Plains: M.E. Sharpe, 1981), Ch. 3.
• 3See "Karl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler," in Anti-Bolshevik Communism (White Plains: M.E. Sharpe 1978) and "On the Concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism," in Economics, Politics, and the Age of Inflation (White Plains: M.E. Sharpe, 1978).
• 4Marx and Keynes (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969) was actually written in the mid-fifties.
• 5See "Monopoly Capital" in Anti-Bolshevik Communism.
• 6See Critique of Marcuse (London: Merlin, 1972).
• 7See "The Economics of Cybernation," New Politics (1962) 1(4):18-33.